The Feminine Trials
by Katie Darren
Summary: When Harry and Ron find out the school is holding Feminine Trials, they're not sure how to react. And when Ginny signs up Harry accidentally, as he feels sorry for her, Ron goes balistic. Because Malfoy's seen Harry join up and wants to join too...
1. Chapter One

Harry Potter...a girl! How awesome is that? Anyway, please review...  
  
CHAPTER ONE:  
  
Ginny Weasley strolled into the great hall, a new girl called Rachel Remus on her shoulder. Rachel was being extremely annoying, flicking her wand at tables and she even turned Draco Malfoy's hat into a joke-water-squirter.  
  
Harry grabbed hold of it, first opportunity, and soaked Draco. "My dad will be furious at me for soaking my school hat!" Draco yelled at him, slamming his bag down at his usual place on his table.  
  
Harry laughed.  
  
"It's only a hat," Ron taunted.  
  
"Yes, but I heard him say it's a very expensive hat," Hermione said, looking over at him. He had retrieved his hat, and was now wringing all the water out. "And I bet his dad will be furious."  
  
"He always brags about his dad," Ron muttered, grabbing a pot of jam and three knifes. "And Harry's dad is much better to talk about, isn't he? What do you think, Harry?"  
  
"Yeah, he is," Harry said bluntly.  
  
"So can we talk about him?"  
  
"Yeah, sure," Harry said, turning away.  
  
"You don't seem too sure, Harry," Hermione said. "Hey, to take your mind off things, do you know the school's holding feminine trials?"  
  
"Feminine trials?" Harry and Ron asked together.  
  
"Yeah, Ginny's holding them," said another voice, and the trio turned and saw Fred's smiling face. "Supposed to be really good. Get a chance for a make-over. I might go in for it, myself."  
  
"What, get made-over like a girl?" Ron asked, and then snorted into his toast. "I don't believe you. I don't believe you'd enter."  
  
"Enter what?" Ginny said, sitting down at a spare seat next to Hermione. A tray of pink leaflets were put on the table, and she handed one leaflet to each person who was present. "Oh, they're just the leaflets."  
  
"Why'd you call it Feminine Trials?" Ron asked her, stuffing a forkful of mash-potato in his mouth.  
  
"Well, I just thought it would be silly to call them anything else," Ginny said and eyed her leaflets carefully, looking for mistakes.  
  
"Why?" Ron pressed.  
  
"Well, because more girls are likely to enter than boys," Ginny told him, sipping pumpkin juice from her goblet. "I'd change it if you like, so Harry will enter. I thought the name was logical."  
  
"Oh it is, it is," Harry said quickly.  
  
"Will you enter?" Ron asked him as he swallowed his mash-potato.  
  
"What?" Harry said, shocked.  
  
"Well, Ginny just said she'd change the name so you'll enter," Ron said, looking at Ginny and then at him and back to Ginny again. He seemed confused, really confused, like he didn't know what he was talking about.  
  
"I won't enter, don't worry," Harry said.  
  
"It's not like anyone will," Ron assured him happily, eyeing his sister cautiously. "It's not exactly the event of the century."  
  
Ginny turned scarlet and Harry saw a tear leak out of her eye.  
  
"Ok, I'll enter," he told her, ignoring Ron's face. Ginny produced a sheet of the best parchment and a beautiful quill pen and told him to write his name. Then she skipped off, taking the tray of leaflets with her.  
  
"Harry, you idiot!" Ron hissed.  
  
"What?" Harry asked, obviously puzzled.  
  
"Draco Malfoy saw you join, Harry, and now he's talking to Ginny," Hermione whispered frantically, pointing over to the end of the Slytherin table.  
  
Sure enough, Draco was. And when Harry saw Draco grasp the quill and put it to the parchment, he feared something bad was going on.  
  
"He can get out of it, can't he?" Ron asked.  
  
"I'm not sure," Hermione said truthfully, and picked up the leaflet and flicked through it.  
  
Ron saw her face and, like Harry, feared the worst. 


	2. Chapter Two

Wow, the second chapter...time flies...  
  
CHAPTER TWO:  
  
Harry worried about the Feminine Trials all evening. He didn't even get one bit of homework done. And what was even more annoying was that Hermione kept shooting him odd looks and Ginny Weasley kept mouthing 'girl' at him and also smiling at the same time.  
  
Neville came up to him. "I heard you entered the Feminine Trials," he said, his quill stuck between his teeth. "I'd just like to congratulate you. They have been held before and people have died..."  
  
"Died?" Harry said, biting his tongue. "Oh, it was such a mistake. Neville, I'm not going to do it if you can die."  
  
"Joke, joke," Neville said, his ears turning red.  
  
"And is word all over school?" Harry asked. He knew it was, somehow. He had been prepared to expect the worst, and now it had come he'd found that he was not prepared at all.  
  
"Yes," Neville said in a tiny voice.  
  
"Well, I'm going to bed," Harry said quickly.  
  
The next day, there were items of mail at breakfast for all those entering. Draco found his envelope, opened it and then read it with a smile on his face. He smiled at everyone who passed him, including Harry.  
  
"Good luck, Potter," he said spitefully.  
  
"Oh, I'm not entering," Harry told him simply. "I burnt my envelope...not that I got one, of course."  
  
"Granger's entering, isn't she?" Draco asked, his smile now turning into a smirk and pointing into his cheeks at the end. "Hope she wins, she needs it. Needs that hair straightened and those teeth shrunk."  
  
Harry frowned at him and moved over to the Gryffindor table. Ginny was there and she was holding something out to him. It was the envelope. Draco saw, and started laughing.  
  
"Potter's got an envelope!"  
  
"So have you!" Harry shot back, his eyes burning with hatred.  
  
"I thought you burnt it, Potter!" Malfoy yelled, his face now containing evidence of a thousand smirks all at once.  
  
"You need to win the Trials!" Harry yelled back to him. "You need a plastic job on your nose! But I bet Ginny doesn't do it, does she? And at least Hermione has a decent nose and teeth and decent hair!"  
  
"She's a Mudblood, Potter, nothing's decent about her!" Malfoy shouted. Harry lunged at him, but Ginny grabbed the end of Harry's cloak and pulled him back down on his seat.  
  
Hermione ran from the hall, crying.  
  
Ginny ran after her, but not because she was upset.  
  
Almost everyone turned up for The Feminine Trials. Ginny Weasley sat at two desks, one for marking and one for ticking off names. Luna Lovegood, the loopy girl from Ravenclaw, was with her.  
  
"I'm going to call you up one by one," Ginny said importantly, standing up. "I want you to say why you deserve a make-over, and why you signed up for these Feminine Trials in the first place."  
  
Harry and Malfoy looked at each other, hating one another.  
  
Some time later, Ginny announced: "The winner is Harry Potter! Harry, come up here please! You are going to be presented with a certificate and a medal and a book of make-over tips!"  
  
Harry looked around the room, and fled.  
  
Hermione ran after him, and found him sulking in the toilets. "You take it," he said. "You take all the glory. I think I look good enough as it is. I have enough glory to last me a life-time. Everyone knows my name, and I'm famous because my parents are dead. So you take it, I don't care."  
  
"I think you do, Harry," said Hermione in a meek voice.  
  
"Yeah, I do, but so what? You deserve it more than me," he said. "Go in and say I dropped out ages ago. I didn't even make a speech. Malfoy made a good one and Ginny picked me. I think she's still got a crush on me, you know. And I only signed up for her benefit."  
  
"Why?" Hermione asked.  
  
"She was sad," Harry answered. 


	3. Chapter Three

I'm not sure if I even need a chapter three...  
  
CHAPTER THREE:  
  
Ginny crept to Harry's bed, pulled open his flask and poured some odd- smelling purple potion into it. Then she shook the empty vial, as if her life depended on it. She'd been so upset when he'd sent a message saying that he'd dropped out. He deserved to win.  
  
"What are you doing?"  
  
Ginny spun around, scared. She'd just finished latching the lock on Harry's bag and Harry was here...right now!  
  
"Um...I want to borrow a textbook," she lied.  
  
"Well, you know that I keep my textbooks in a safe under my bed," Harry said. He'd told her once before. "So there was no reason to be rooting around in my rucksack, right?"  
  
Yes, Ginny thought to herself.  
  
"Go, Ginny, and may your life be spared," said Harry in an odd tone. He took his flask from his bag and uncapped it.  
  
Ginny watched him.  
  
Harry's eyes narrowed.  
  
"I thought I told you to leave," he snapped, putting the bottle to his lips. "Now, I would like to drink in peace."  
  
Ginny couldn't believe what she was seeing!  
  
Her potion and it tasted foul, and he was drinking it!  
  
Ginny left, holding the empty vial behind her back. She went downstairs to enter the common room, and nabbed a chair by the fire. There she stayed, studying until the first light of day.  
  
"Ginny, are you okay?" Hermione's voice asked. Hermione was worried. She'd been watching Ginny all night, out the corner of her eye. And now Ginny wasn't going to wake up.  
  
Well, not right now.  
  
Not soon.  
  
"Aaaagh!"  
  
A voice rang from Harry's dormitory.  
  
Ginny's eyes snapped open. "Oh, cool," she said sarcastically. "I'm having forty winks and then Harry goes and spoils them."  
  
"You don't know that," Hermione said.  
  
"Oh I do, indeed I do," Ginny said knowledgeably.  
  
Hermione raced up the stairs, Ginny on close heel, and into Harry's dormitory. She could see the problem at once.  
  
A girl was there, on Harry's bed.  
  
In Harry's clothing.  
  
"You've eaten Harry!" Ginny exclaimed.  
  
Hermione sat down, tenderly, on the edge of Harry's bed. "What's your name? You're not allowed in this room, but perhaps you didn't know that."  
  
"My name is Harry," the girl exclaimed. "And I do know girls are not allowed in this dormitory, but I can come in here because..."  
  
Hermione gasped.  
  
"You're Harry," she whispered.  
  
"What happened?" Ginny asked carefully, so that she didn't go red and admit that she'd caused Harry to turn into a girl.  
  
"You know jolly well what happened," Harry huffed. "You were in the dorm. I took a drink from my flask. You left. And look at me now. I'm a girl. I know you had something to do with this."  
  
"No, I didn't," Ginny squeaked, frightened.  
  
"You'll just have to get used to being a girl, Harry," Hermione said softly. "And you have lovely hair, may I say. At least that's something to be proud of. And I advise you to change your name."  
  
"Why?" Harry asked, devastated.  
  
"Well, a girl doesn't have a name like Harry," Hermione said. "It's pretty crap. They have names like...like mine."  
  
"Yours is unusual," Harry said, sighing. 


	4. Chapter Four

Chapter Four already?  
  
CHAPTER FOUR:  
  
Harry dressed in some of Hermione's spare clothes. "Alice," he said suddenly, as Hermione ironed some socks with her wand for him. "I'll be called Alice Framsi. Yes, that'll fit."  
  
"I don't know," Hermione said, holding up two identical pairs of socks. "But I guess it'll have to do."  
  
She handed him a pair of blue socks.  
  
"Do you mean my name?" Harry asked.  
  
"No, I meant your socks," Hermione told him, folding the other pair with magic and using the magic to pack them in a drawer. "But what's this about a name? Have you decided yet?"  
  
"Alice Framsi," Harry said proudly.  
  
"And what about your copy?" Hermione asked. "All people who get turned into people of the opposite gender need to have a copy. It says so in that book...right over there, on the windowsill."  
  
Harry rushed over to the windowsill and grabbed it. He flipped to the index, and it was there. Under 'gender-copies'.  
  
"There's no spell to turn back," he said, alarmed.  
  
Hermione rushed over and grabbed the book from him. She flipped through it as fast as the speed of light. "What?"  
  
"There's no spell," Harry repeated in the same urgent tone.  
  
"That's the first time a book's ever let me down," Hermione said, throwing it on the floor with disgust.  
  
"There might be a spell in another book," Harry said hopefully, but Hermione didn't seem to hear him.  
  
Because the book had let her down, and because the headmaster was out on some important business, her resources were slipping down the drain. So, due to the head in her hands, it looked like she'd given up.  
  
"Don't stop," Harry said.  
  
But Hermione sniffed.  
  
"I am," she said. "I've got nothing else I can do."  
  
EEE 


	5. Chapter Five

Wow, Chapter Five...I reckon I'm flying on air, like that snowman in raymond brigg's classic tale...  
  
CHAPTER FIVE:  
  
Ron saw Hermione and a girl with beautiful golden hair at the far end of the common room that evening. He came up to them. They were sharing Bertie Bott Beans and chatting wildly.  
  
"Who's she?" Ron demanded.  
  
"Who's who?" Hermione asked sweetly.  
  
"That...that girl next to you," Ron said, getting more and more stressed. "And where's Harry? He's supposed to be showing me how he rides his Firebolt with-out falling off."  
  
"He's not here," said the girl.  
  
"Well, where is he?" Ron asked.  
  
"Out in the grounds, waiting for you," Hermione lied, popping a Bean inside her mouth. "Ooh, yuck! Earwax! Ron, meet Alice. And Alice, meet Ronald. I used to be one of his best friends."  
  
"You still are," Ron argued, hurt.  
  
Hermione shrugged. "Oh, I don't know. It's getting a bit boring hanging with you and Harry."  
  
She winked at Alice.  
  
"Is that Harry?" Ron asked in disbelief.  
  
"Uh...no," said Hermione, quickly covering up the truth. "He's waiting for you in the grounds, we told you. Now, Alice and I have homework to be completed. Don't we, Alice?"  
  
Harry nodded, grinning.  
  
"Yeah, that diagram of Mimbulous Mimbletonia needs to be finished and I need your help on a Transfiguration essay," he said, running his fingers down his hair and trying to remember that he was a girl.  
  
For the time it took to find a cure, anyway.  
  
Ron left the grounds, broom tucked under his arm.  
  
"Well, that was a lucky escape," Hermione chortled, opening her Herbology text-book gingerly.  
  
"It's not going to burn you," Harry told her.  
  
Hermione looked over at him, oddly. "I know."  
  
Harry got to grips with being a girl over the next few days. It occurred to him he was never going to turn back, but he didn't let that horrible thought stop his flow of perfect work.  
  
He'd discovered something.  
  
Your work was better and you got perfect grades if you were a girl. He smiled to himself as he was handed his vial of potion back, by Snape, in one lesson with an 'A' attached to the glass on a post-it-note.  
  
Snape was his worst enemy.  
  
Ginny Weasley had really done him a favour.  
  
"Well done, Harry," Hermione whispered to him.  
  
Ron spun round from his seat. "Harry? Speaking of Harry, where was he when I wanted him a week ago?"  
  
"In the common room," Harry admitted.  
  
"With me," Hermione added, sighing quietly.  
  
"Well, I couldn't see him," Ron hissed, gouging out his cement-like potion from his cauldron. "At least I don't get perfect grades. So what was he, invisible or something?"  
  
"No, he was there," Hermione said in a tiny voice. "He was right next to me. He is right next to me now, in fact."  
  
Way to go, Hermione, Harry thought.  
  
"So, he gets perfect grades because he's a girl?" Ron said loudly, after muttering a spell that made his vial float across the room to Snape's desk.  
  
Draco Malfoy stopped ladling his potion into his vial, and turned round abruptly and faster than the speed of light. "Harry's a girl?" Millicent Bulstrode, Draco's girlfriend, blurted out.  
  
"Yes, but ssh," Ron muttered.  
  
But it was useless, because now everyone in the room knew.  
  
Snape stood up. "Is this true?"  
  
Hermione nodded sadly, and bit her tongue.  
  
"So, where is Harry now?" Snape asked, sending Ron's vial back to him. "I am afraid this mess it utterly worthless, Weasley. It needs to be dunked down the toilet, and so does your head."  
  
Draco and Millicent laughed loudly.  
  
Hermione gestured to the seat next to her. "Sorry," she whispered to Harry, and pulled his chair out.  
  
Harry had no choice but to stand.  
  
Hermione pointed to him. "He's here." 


	6. Chapter Six

By the way, when I mentioned the copy in chapter four...everyone who gets a gender change has to have one so no one knows they're missing from their real body, but Harry hasn't got a copy, has he?  
  
Gee whizz, Chapter Six...  
  
CHAPTER SIX:  
  
Harry woke up in the dormitory early on Sunday morning. Today Hermione had promised to take him to the library to search for clues, and maybe to Diagon Alley as well, and he hoped she hadn't forgotten.  
  
Snape had given him – well, her – detention. "And I want you to find a cure, as I don't want to be looking at that face all the time," he'd spat at Harry when the bell had rang.  
  
"Yes, sir," Harry had answered.  
  
Hermione came down to the common room half an hour later. "All set? Well, I am and I thought that we could miss breakfast..."  
  
"I can't miss breakfast because of books," Harry told her, quickly, before he was dragged to the library without nourishment. "I'll look at as many books as you want me to, if I can have something to eat first."  
  
"Ok," Hermione agreed.  
  
"Sure you don't mind?" Harry asked.  
  
"I'll wait here," Hermione assured him. "Just in case Ron comes down, so I can tell him that we didn't mean to keep your secret from him."  
  
"Right," Harry said, nodding.  
  
He left, and Hermione sighed. "I really hope he finds a cure soon," said a voice. Hermione spun round.  
  
There, in the comfiest chair in the common room, sat Lavender Brown. "I'm not having any breakfast either. Is that really Harry that you were talking to? And I thought her name was Alice."  
  
"Oh, it is," Hermione said shakily.  
  
Lavender Brown smiled, and Hermione nodded.  
  
"I was talking about Harry with her," she added a second later. "She's new – do you know that? I am supposed to be showing her around, she's really nice once you get to know her."  
  
Lavender Brown shot her an odd look, and walked off. "Your hair...it's short. I thought you'd never get rid of your long hair," Lavender said before she said the portrait-password to get out of the room.  
  
Hermione put a hand to her head in horror. Her hair wasn't short. It had just been a wind-up.  
  
And she was glad. 


End file.
